Chicago Tribune                                                                                            April 5, 1998

Germany’s New Storm Troopers

Fuerstenwalde, Germany —A kind of ethnic cleansing is taking place in democratic Germany, spawned by violent right-wing groups against mainly Third World foreign-ers whom they blame for taking jobs from Germans. In towns and villages all over the former states of communist-ruled eastern Germany, the rightists threaten and beat up foreigners, trying to force them to leave the country. About ten of their victims have been killed in the past two years.

“You don’t find foreigners on the streets in eastern Germany past 6 or 8 p.m.,” said Bernd Wagner, a former police officer who has made a study of rightist violence. “In the villages, it’s difficult for the police because often their own sons are involved in the violence,” he said. “And the rightists have some sympathizers among the police. I’ve heard police say all foreigners are criminals, and the young people help us keep the countryside clean.”

Antiforeigner sentiment is a problem in several European countries, but the issue is particularly sensitive in Germany because of its Nazi past and because its extreme Right, particularly in eastern Germany, is prone to violence. Foreigners account for only two percent of the population in eastern Germany, but high unemployment in the region has made them a focus for smoldering discontent.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that democratic traditions have been slow to take root in a region that was under communist rule for nearly a half century. The evils of the Nazi era have been drilled into schoolchildren in western Germany since World War II, but not in the east. “National Socialism (Nazism) and communism were based on the same values,” Wagner said. “The motor of dictatorship is the same, if not the car itself.”

The rightists, whose trademarks are shaved heads and combat fatigues, often are referred to as neo-Nazis. They prefer to call themselves Nationals. With unemployment in the east running as high as twenty-three percent, twice the national average, and many people alienated by a sense of being looked down upon by Germans in the more prosperous west, the groups tend to be anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-foreigner. The rightists also direct some of their anger at homeless people living on the streets. In their vernacular, foreigners are “ticks”—that is, bloodsuckers—and the street people are “cockroaches.”  

Mohammed Al Thavr, 17, a Yemeni student who has lived in eastern Germany since age five, is among those who have felt the wrath of rightists. On February 19, en route to school, he encountered four rightist youths who verbally abused him, fired a blank pistol at him, and threw sharp-pointed metal objects. Then one of them, wearing boots with metal caps, kicked him in the face. Thavr suffered a broken nose and cheek bone and a severe concussion. “I’m afraid to go out now,” Thavr said. “The police have stopped protecting us foreigners, and protect the Nazis. When something happens to me, people look away. It’s not that the country is bad. There are a lot of nice people in Germany. But here the bad ones are stronger.

Thavr lives with a German couple, Berend and Beate Maria Klevenhusen. “The Nazis are only a very small group, but active,” Beate Klevenhusen said. “At home, they hear about a foreigner with a job while their father is out of work, and they adopt the attitude of their parents. They are looking for something to hold onto that is not given to them by the family or by the country. They have a sense of not getting anywhere.” Thavr’s two attackers are awaiting trial.  

Fuerstenwalde is far from being a major hotbed of rightist violence. A town of 34,000 just thirty-four miles southeast of Berlin, it hosts about 1,500 foreigners. Town authorities have been more vigorous than most in addressing attacks on foreigners. They have set up youth and sports clubs to attract young people away from violence, and hold history workshops to reach the young about the Nazi period.

In the old East German communist state, the lessons of this dark period of German history were not presented to children in the way they have been in West German schools. They denied there was anti-Semitism in the East, and there was no discussion of what National Socialism meant to minorities. The magazine Der Spiegel recently conducted a survey in eastern Germany which found that sixty-five percent of people think too many foreigners are living in Germany, forty-eight percent say foreigners take jobs from Germans, and fourteen percent say a dictatorship could solve the region’s problems better than the present govern-ment.

Andreas Politz, who heads the Department of Social Affairs at the town hall, said, “You can’t say right-wing extreme ideas are on the fringe here. They are very widespread. But young people are not the only ones to blame. “What about the adult who stands behind a curtain and watches what is going on?” he said.